


threads

by sunbrights



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Post Reichenbach, Telephone Calls, background ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 15:30:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/888861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunbrights/pseuds/sunbrights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What he will never tell Mycroft is that it's the only talking he does anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	threads

It's Mycroft's idea. Molly thinks it's her idea.

Either way, Sherlock has no say in the matter.

*

Once a month, they are each provided with a burner phone. Never on the same day, never in the same manner. It's "provided" only in the sense that Sherlock knows it comes from Mycroft; once he found the phone carefully sealed into three plastic bags poking out of the skip behind the restaurant where he was staying.

The phones come preloaded with fifteen minutes. Topping up is not an option. The corresponding number is already typed in upon discovery. All the minutes are used in one conversation, and they both destroy their respective phones immediately after they've finished. 

By unspoken agreement, Molly always calls him. For safety, and because by the time she's found hers she can be certain he's already found his.

What he will never tell Mycroft is that it's the only talking he does anymore.

*

The first time they talk, he says "Hello," and Molly cries for three of their allotted fifteen minutes. She sniffles through the other twelve.

*

"Do you have to talk like that?" It takes her four months before she asks.

"Talk like how?"

"Like that, how you're talking now. And the other times. It's always different."

Oh. "Yes."

"It's really strange," she says. "I mean, I can still hear _you_ because I know it's you, but if I'm not paying attention it's like you're... I don't even know who."

"That's the idea."

*

"So... where are you now?"

"Molly."

"Sorry! Sorry, sorry. I know that– I'm sorry. I won't ask again."

He listens.

"Um, do you like it there?"

"Molly."

"What, you– you can't even tell me if you like it or not?"

Sherlock steps into an alleyway to wait. He tips his head back to look at a smear of clouds behind an office building.

"What places do you think I like?"

It takes her a moment. "Oh."

They spend the rest of their time speaking of London.

*

"He's working so hard. Greg is."

It comes out during a lull in the conversation. It's late for her; she's kept her voice hushed low in a way that implies a perceived need for quiet, not an actual one. In a rare instance where the time of day is the same for the both of them, it's late for him as well. He waits at the only kebab place still open, the only one in line.

"Oh, has that started?" Sherlock asks. He tucks the phone between his jaw and shoulder to accept his takeaway.

A pause. (His tone throws her off-balance.) "What?"

"You and the Detective Inspector."

"What? No. No, that isn't– We haven't. I mean, you... How did you–"

"I don't know why all of you think I'm blind to romantic entanglements just because they're romantic in nature. I do have eyes and ears and a brain."

"I don't think that," she murmurs.

"Either way," he says.

"Well, we're not actually together, me and him. Not officially. I mean, I was thinking about it. I was going to ask him–" He hums, and she stops. "Right, no. That's not what you wanted to hear about. He, um, he's under investigation now, you know. After... everything."

"I expected as much."

"They don't give him the same kinds of cases they used to, and he's always under supervision. He's at hearings every other week."

She falls silent. Sherlock waits.

"He feels so guilty." Her voice is even lower now, the hushing of a broken confidence. "For what happened to you. He's never said so, but I know he does. On top of everything, he's working so hard to make sure none of your cases get overturned. To prove that you really were who you said you were. Not, not just for him, not for the investigation into him, but for you. They hardly listen, because of who he is, but."

"I can think of plenty of people with more cause to feel guilty than he has," Sherlock says, after a moment.

"I know." Sherlock can hear her cat mewling in the background. She shushes it quietly. "But I can't tell him you told me that, can I?"

She knows the answer, but she's asking for it anyway. Sherlock stares into the darkness and waits for a bus.

"No," he agrees.

*

"We finally got him to come out with us last night, me and Greg."

She does that, talk in circles so that she doesn't have to use John's name. She won't say it, even in stories involving both John and Lestrade, when her pronouns get tangled up in each other. It does little more than set Sherlock's teeth on edge. 

He's stretched out on a park bench some time before sunrise, with the sky starting to pale at the edges. He'd originally come here to meet a contact. Time had gotten away from him long before Molly's phone call.

"He's doing well. He's not– he's not _good_ , obviously, but. He's better. He, um." A train of thought interrupts, makes her giggle. It's nervous more than happy. "He laughs along with us now. That's nice. He hasn't done that in a while."

She thinks she's helping. Sherlock doesn't say anything.

"We don't have to talk about it," Molly says after a moment, soft and steady. "But I thought you should know."

Sherlock rolls over onto his side so that the slats of the bench dig into his ribs. It's a few inches too short; his feet hang off the end.

"Got any recipes that can be made with just crackers, beans, and white cheddar slices?"

There's a pause on the other end of the line. He can picture her chewing her lip, willing herself not to say _Sherlock_ in disbelieving tones, because that's a name that she actually does need to avoid saying out loud.

"Hypothetically," he prompts.

"Please take care of yourself," she says, all in a rush. Then she tells him about a way to crush the crackers and melt the cheese that would balance out the beans better than just stacking them on top of each other.

*

Molly doesn't mention John in either of their next two conversations, not even as a wayward pronoun.

Instead, she spends one describing all the changes that have been made to her route to Bart's in the past few months.

"They've put in another Starbucks, is that relevant?" 

"Everything is relevant."

"Okay, more or less than the first Starbucks they put in?"

"Molly."

She's smiling when she says, "There's a new Starbucks. Between those offices and the little shoe place."

The other she spends detailing an autopsy she'd performed that morning on the victim of a car accident that, she adds in a whisper, might not have been so accidental after all.

"You would've really liked this one, I know it," she tells him. He does the time zone calculation and decides she must be telling him this on her lunch break. Or skipping it to tell him, rather, going by the ambient noise around her voice. "Just wait till you find out what she had in her stomach."

She's right, as it turns out. He really, really likes it, even before she gets to the bit about the woman's stomach. By the time she does, he's aching to be there himself.

"Any ideas?" she asks, and he tells her the five that he's gotten to so far.

*

"Her name is Mary," Molly tells him the time after that.

"She's really very lovely," she goes on after his silence gets too big for her, which isn't very long at all. "I only just met her a week ago. He brought her when we went out for drinks, you know, all of us. She's funny, she makes him laugh. All of us, really. She's good for him, I can tell. She opens him up, I haven't seen him like this since–" She falters. "Since...."

She cuts herself off, painfully, rather than try for an ending other than the one they both know she had in mind.

His silence gets bigger.

"Please say something." Her voice is very small in the static.

"I'm glad," he says.

She exhales into the receiver. He hears her resolve break before it does, the push of breath before a sibilant.

"Molly."

She inhales, as if to pull the intention back into her lungs. "I'm sorry. Yes. I know, I wasn't– I'm sorry."

"She's good for him, you said."

She swallows, and her answer comes out stronger than the rest of it. "Yes."

"Then I'm glad."

"He hasn't forgotten you," she blurts.

It makes him nauseous, how unbearably maudlin she insists on being.

"She told me, while he and Greg were getting the next round, when it was just the two of us. He tells her about you. All kinds of stories, all the–" She sees it suddenly, the flaw, and finishes weakly, "All the time."

"He at least picks the exciting ones, I hope," Sherlock muses.

Neither of them say anything else for a long time. Molly quietly switches the topic to one of Lestrade's newer cases, and that is the end of it.

*

Three months later, he doesn't answer the phone. Not because he'd rather not, but because he rather can't. 

*

"Oh my god," Molly says when he picks up the month after.

"Molly–"

"Oh, thank god."

"Molly, where are you?"

"I'm at work," she gasps, "I'm at work, I called as soon as I found it, I–"

"Is there a closet nearby?"

"Yes. Yes, I'll– Yes."

She keeps her breathing even until the latch clicks shut, and then it comes in ragged clumps as she struggles to keep her volume low.

"I thought you were dead," she risks, even in a whisper. "I was so sure. I called over and over, I thought, there's no way you didn't find it, unless you were, unless you had–"

She's saying too much to be contained in a janitor's closet at Bart's. "You need to breathe," he snaps in warning.

"What happened?" she asks instead. "No, never mind, I know you can't tell me. Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"But–"

"I'm fine," he repeats. He makes a conscious effort to make the syllables rounder, less piercing. "There was an incident and I dealt with it. I am fine, Molly."

She takes a shaking breath. Then another, and another, until they don't shake anymore.

"You don't understand," she whispers. "The first time was awful. Just– awful. You weren't there, you didn't see."

She's talking about his funeral. He knows without asking, and he's not stupid enough to ask for a verification when he doesn't need one. She's being more conscious of her words, and is best kept that way.

She's wrong, of course. He was there, he did see. He doesn't correct her.

"I thought, I can't do that again. But then I remembered, I wasn't going to. No one would even know. Just, just your brother. And me. And."

She has to breathe her breath steady again.

"No one can ever know," he reminds her. "Whatever happens to me. Molly?"

"I know," she replies, half-giggle and half-sniffle. "Don't worry, I know. When Greg asked me why I was so upset I told him I'd had a nasty row with my mum. Which was half true anyway."

Sherlock smiles at a patch of damp over the door of the basement he sleeps in.

"He bought me dinner after," she adds miserably.

"Good," he replies.

They spend the rest of their minutes talking idly. He tells her about the damp on the ceiling, she tells him about where she found the phone this time (strapped to the foot of a body she had to reexamine unexpectedly). For the rest of it, they sit in easy silence.

"Please take care," she says in lieu of a goodbye.

"Yes," he answers in kind.

*

The last month, he breaks the rules. Because he can, and because he's dearly missed the sensation of breaking Mycroft's rules.

He finds the phone in the lower branches of a bush, dew forming on the edges of the bag it's wrapped in. He sends one text, to one number:

_Have tied final knot. Will_  
 _need fresh toes upon return_  
 _to London. Only first two. Be_  
 _prepared in advance._

_SH_


End file.
